Pierre Bacot | |
|---|---|
 Pierre Bacot by Henrietta Johnston ca. 1708-10 | |
| Born | 15 November 1671 Tours, France |
| Died | 18 March 1730 Charles Town, South Carolina |
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Pierre Bacot (1671–1730) was a prominent French Huguenot planter in colonial South Carolina.
Born in Tours, France, Pierre was the son of Pierre Bacot (1637-1702) and Jacquine Mercier (1649-1709), and grandson of Pierre Bacot (1597-1637) and Jacqueline Menessier (1615-). To escape religious persecution after the Edict of Nantes, Pierre fled France with his parents and brother Daniel, arriving in Charles Town, South Carolina in 1685.[1] The elder Pierre and wife Jacquine had a daughter Elizabeth, born 1694 in South Carolina (married Jonas Bonhost[2]), and received land grants in 1699 and 1700 in St Andrews Parish, lands which became part of Middleton Place. The family became naturalized citizens about 1696.[3]
This period of time was known as Le Refuge, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, during which French Protestants were forbidden by Louis XIV to leave the country and were ordered to convert to Catholicism under penalty of death. The first 45 refugees to South Carolina arrived in Charles Town in 1680 aboard the Richmond, a British man-of-war.[4] The Margaret arrived in 1685, followed by several other ships in the following years.[5]
After his father's death, Pierre Bacot (1671-1730) and brother Daniel moved to Goose Creek, about 20 miles upriver from Charles Town on the Cooper River.[6] In early colonial times Goose Creek became the home base of the “Goose Creek Men,” the politically and economically powerful faction that consistently challenged the authority of the Lords Proprietors in the colony. While white inhabitants were largely Anglican, many Huguenots were established there after 1700.[7]
The Goose Creek men became leaders of the early Indian trade, and by the 1690s many held important offices in the colonial government. At first the Goose Creek men dealt mainly in Indian slaves, while later the deerskin trade dominated.[8] Pierre Bacot primarily made his living through the buying and selling of land.[9]
A granite cross placed on the site of a French church founded about 1682 near the headwaters of Goose Creek marks what was probably the third site settled by Huguenots in South Carolina.[10]
Bacot first married Marianne Fleur du Gue, who died in 1716; they had no children. He then married Marie Peronneau (1685-1773). They had four children:
1. Samuel (1716-1771) married Rebecca Foissin and settled in Darlington District.
2. Mary (1717-1806) married Peter Allston.
3. Elizabeth (1725-1789) married Charles Dewar (1720-1775).[11]
4. Peter (1728-1787) married Elizabeth Harramond, settled as a merchant in Charleston.[12]
Bacot commissioned Henrietta Johnston to paint his portrait, one of his first wife Marianne, and one of his sister Elizabeth. The portrait of Bacot and the portrait of his wife Marianne were donated to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. Henrietta's husband, Rev. Gideon Johnston (1668–1716), Bishop of London’s Commissary in South Carolina, said of Charles Town in a letter to the Bishop of Salisbury in 1708, “I never repented so much of anything...as my coming to this Place”; “the People here...are the Vilest race of Men upon the Earth”; while in a 1709 report to the English church authorities, “were it not for the assistance my wife gives me by drawing of pictures (which can last but a little time in a place so ill peopled) I should not be able to live.”[13]